


Darkly In My Body

by Raynidreams



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Coercion, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Past Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 16:13:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13298508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raynidreams/pseuds/Raynidreams
Summary: Rey appears to Kylo to tell him about Leia's death.TJL spoilers.





	Darkly In My Body

**Author's Note:**

> I suspect nothing in this will be new with a fandom this big. I'm just a sucker for dream/visitation interaction and Kylo/Rey gave me leave with their Force-bond-thing, so I had to write. 
> 
> Special warning for major character death – RIP the beloved Carrie Fisher—as the premise for this story. I hate me for that.
> 
> Rey is slightly OOC, but if people will leave damaged toys around, I’m going to put them back together as I like. 
> 
> Their bond is written that they can interact with each other's environment as if they are physically there. (I've only seen the film once so there is bound to be some canon eschewing.)

He's in the shower when he looks over to find her standing there, her gaze set on him intently. Time passes slower the closer one is to a source of gravitation and as their eyes meet, the moment feels stretched out, working in slow motion. He wipes his face with an unsettled hand. She is haloed by a neon fixture above, her eyes wide with tears. Her expression confirms what he'd already known and his mouth flattens to cover for how his insides churn.  
  
"She's dead,"  he states needlessly at last. A buried sense of emptiness flickers with white-hot pain before he kills that too.  
  
Her face hardens at his words. He scans it. Fixes to memory where her hair curls with sweat at her temples and tears have cleared a path through the dirt on her cheeks.    
  
“I came to tell you. I thought you should know,” she replies, voice ravaged.  
  
He flexes his shoulders carefully to cover for his pent up breath and nods. He takes in the rest of her with a quick glance down, recording how her body trembles. She's clearly exhausted, bone weary, he feels it, and yet she is still unbroken. He admires that, her ability to bend and not break. Giving into temptation, he reaches out one hand and pulls her under the water with him. He's surprised when she comes without resistance. Touching, emotions filter from her to him like a sickness. They rush through her...and then they falter. She's going into shock, he understands, her skin cold under his fingertips. Her heartbeat subdued.  
  
Close, he breathes quieter and does his best to emanate calm. Mindful of her body temperature, he turns the water hotter with mental flick.  
  
“Another piece of the past has fallen,” he comments as the liquid runs heavily down from his dark hair and onto hers. Her forehead crumbles up as she recoils and her forearm slips out of his light grasp. He sighs and looks over her shoulders into the shadows of the room beyond before seeking her face again. “Time moves forward, as it should.”  
  
“How can you say that?”  
  
“I was ordered to go to Skywalker by her. She set me on this path." He inhales deeply, his abdominal muscles brushing her phantom ones with all the tactility as if they stood in the same room. "Perhaps she truly was Vader's daughter, after all,” he ponders out loud. He knows it will provoke her.  
  
Her throat works as she swallows in anger. It quickens her nervous system and fights against the drop in blood pressure that the highs and lows of adrenalin have caused. She yells, “Damn you!” And slams hands against his bare chest. Heat sparks between them. "Damn you!"  
  
Her chest heaves and then she thrusts herself back from him only to slump once more beyond the seclusion of the spray. She's grief stuck, a literal phrase, he sees. Her spirit has taken this hit hard. Something strives to flicker past the indelible marks in his soul and he is unable to quash the need to reach out to her. Uncomfortable, he turns aside and motions the shower off.  
  
Blood from the battle outlines his footprints as he moves around her into the room to dress. He barely masters his limp from where shrapnel has speared his thigh. Aware of this and of other new wounds, of his old scars, a number caused by her, he needs to clothe himself. Cover where his body isn't obeying his will. Impatient, he pulls bottoms on sharply over wet skin before he looks to back to her, at her soaked dirty clothes; the sanguine stains on her hands - stains thicker at her breasts and knees. The pattern is familiar. She'd held someone as they had died in her arms.  
  
His gaze snaps back to her face to witness her head jolt away from his inspection. So it was ghostly version of Organa’s blood as well as his own disappearing down a drain, he realises at last.  
  
“How did it happen?” he asks, despite his better judgement.  
  
“Painfully. Quickly,” she whispers back.  
  
He nods to himself, a bleak frown forming. "An ending."  
  
She flings a gory hand in his direction. “This! This," she repeats, "Is the same blood as runs in your veins! Your mother...Do you feel nothing?”  
  
He steps towards her rather than pulling her to him. For her part she doesn't yield, but gathers her body to its full height. In such close proximity is the only time he feels he dwarfs her. He stops just shy of dominating her space. “It’s a mere set of code, genetics.” He says gently. He tilts his head. "It's a base thing."  
  
“You chased that code in Vader.”  
  
“My former master was given to notions of grandeur in that we could recreate what The Emperor and Vader once did. I realised at his demise it was all just memory and dust. This moment, and the ones to come are the only ones that matter.”  
  
"But you're still walking in his footsteps with the First Order! Their regime, it holds no hope. No freedom."  
  
"Freedom is merely another word for chaos. _Disorder_." The words taste bad on his tongue. He shies his face away.  
  
"The Order is evil!"  
  
He comes back to her.  "And the rebels reward vice."  
  
"You're a murderer!" Rey clenches her fists. “A flesh and bone connection, that's what you've lost. The General was last person who recalls your first breath, your first steps. Memories. _Family._ These things can’t be brought. Once they're gone--”  
  
“Family isn’t everything it’s purported to be,” he speaks over her. He reaches a hand out to her face, stopping an inch away from touching her skin. “Tear that umbilicus out. Choose your bonds. Choose me.”  
  
“Like choice was given to us? Snoke made this!” She gestures between them. “He made YOU! Is that the kind of connection you want? One forged through rage, torment, and fear? Are you so lost that you cannot see the difference?"  
  
He drops away from her and circles her like a wounded animal.  
  
“No. I killed him FOR YOU!What we can have...” Expectation traces through his words.  
  
"...Is nothing," she interrupts. The anger drains from her. She curls her torso, foetal. “'I'm sorry,” she whispers and closes her eyes. "I've failed," she adds.  
  
The words seem a non sequitur and he struggles to make sense of them. The anger she'd shelled before soaks into him as he battles with empathy and the perplexing need to want to comfort her.  
  
"We felt something the first moment we met. A connection. _A recognition_."  
  
It's there now. And in speaking of it, the air seems to sizzle again between them, the lull turning thunderous and thick. Kylo shifts around her agitated, and lifts an open palm, "You came to me. Come to me fully."  
  
She unfurls and steps away sharply. He drops his arm.  
  
“This pain will pass," he assures her. "In time, this will all fade. I can show you how to achieve that singleness and master it."  
  
She swings without warning and hits him hard in the face. Pain blooms. Her next wild swing, he catches in his palm, capturing bone and sinew. He strokes a thumb over her knuckles.  
  
She looks at their joined hands. "You're lying to yourself. At peace? You're unstable, like solar flares. Everything is a mess around you and it spreads." She pauses, her aura shifting.  
  
His reply slips out before he can lock himself down. "It's not just me. Untaught, you'll get hurt."  
  
Caught in the crossfire of feelings, she misreads him. “You'll hurt me?" She smiles in his face, her air incredulous.  
  
He blinks, half turns away before coming back. “My concern for you is as dangerous to me as it is regrettable,” he replies, his manner gruff. He has to work to still his thumb of the hand which still cradles her fist.  
  
She meets his gaze for a long moment. "I'm dangerous to you because I'm free. Free to hunt you down." He hears her heartbeat in his ears as he feels his own pulse quicken in his chest at the thought. They’re separated by an immeasurable space, but in this, it's just them, alone in the universe.  
  
He licks at his lower lip.  
  
"You'll soon find that your life with the Resistance will cease in its appeal. Infuriatingly so," he emphasises. "When the people you talk to, interact with, can't follow where you go, I'll be waiting."  
  
"No,” she replies, not even angry sounding. "I'm an idiot to think things would have changed." She plucks her hand free.  
  
Her presence whirlwinds around him and that break in touch twists him up, almost unbearably so. "You will always be singled out among them. Treated with worship and then fear. The caprice of them..." he ventures close. "They want you for your power. When they've used it up, they'll reject you."  
  
It takes him a moment to identify her expression and the feeling she emotes: pity.  
  
He snorts, irritated.  
  
The anger that she'd expunged before flits right back. It settles there clearly in her level eyes. "They cared for me BEFORE they knew I could use the Force. Han Solo...” He turns from her and marches a few prowling, aching, steps away. She chases him, fencing to meet him. “He offered me a job, solely on the skills I had learned. It had fuck all to do with the Force. Finn..." He sweeps her a fierce glance, then away. She forces him to meet her stare, "Finn, HE is accepted because of his choices. He accepted me for mine."  
  
"How nice," he gives her an empty smile.  
  
"How can you reject the truth?”  
  
"You deceive yourself."  
  
"Nonsense."  
  
"What about today? They sent three crews on a guaranteed one way mission to a heavily garrisoned system. A suicide squad. Seven of those people I ordered picked up and in doing so, saved them...I might have found more, had my ship not exploded." The agony in his thigh flares up again in thinking about it. There's more than just drops of blood by his feet. It's starting to become a pool.  
  
She passes a look over his lower half and sets her jaw.  "Saved, so they can be tortured? Converted? Sent to conditioning?"  
  
"Does it blemish your pristinely clear conscience, ordering pointless deaths? Shipwreck your faith in Organa? How can you not realise that a treaty of peace can only be reached after the ordinances of war have left a pattern for all."  
  
"Are you so blind to the suffering?" She catches his bicep in a bruising grasp. It jolts his leg again and he grunts in pain this time. Something flutters unreadable across her face. Softer, she entreats him to consider, "Children starve. Communities are plundered. Slavery is rife, and the privileged stay privileged."  
  
"It will not always be this way. With control, there will be standards. A system."  
  
"Drugged, or, mute from fear, you mean? You've killed so many. That's not a revolution or a means to an end. It's butchery."  
  
"And the Resistance is populated with only innocents? Cutthroats and thieves. She murdered those fighters today."  
  
"It wasn't her, the General...She didn't send them to die. She sent them with me to _save you_ \--"  
  
He flinches, not physically, but inside. She senses it, he can tell.  
  
She presses her advantage. "--She came. After all you've done. After murdering her lover, she cared enough to come for you when..." She glances around the chrome and unnatural fluorescents of his bare room aboard the Destroyer, "When Nux fixed your ship. He wants you dead. The slicer he employed for the rigged detonation code also sold us the information as to the plan."  
  
He jerks straight, control subservient to fury. _I'll kill him slowly_ , he swears to himself. The veins in his forearms pump up from blood flow. As the rage suffuses him, he pictures himself as she does, the images received in a wordless communication. She sees his wounds, inside and out. The scars. How the darkness poisons him, twisting his mind here and there. A tear falls for him.  
  
It's then he reads from her mind another image: His mother, supine, bleeding in her lap. _Save him...You are the only one...Tell him, I forgive..._  
  
He fights back against the tide of emotion. Guilt breaks through the dam first. It's not a feeling linked to the light, but it's something greyer than black hate and red rage. Then he gets angry all over again, this time, at his mother - the burn easier to cope with than the ashes left in the wake of the picture of her death. Of her forgiveness.    
  
Rey comes closer, drawn as if magnetised to his turmoil. Her hands are held out, facing up. "You mention killing the past, however, you're the one locked into it. The world won't forgive you but she did. Do the same, pardon yourself. It's the only way to go from here. The only hope you have."  
  
Horror lurks. It's too painful. He channels his confusion in to mediating his reaction to her instead. Addictively, the drip of anger settles around him. He tries to reset it as a barrier between them.  
  
She feels it. "You had it in your head that if you became your grandfather, then all this pain, this confusion, rejection, will stop. It's not going to. Dealing with our choices is what makes us human. Dealing with _hurt_. You wanted to be like Vader...He ended up mostly machine. Is that what you really want? To be taken piece at a time, physically and mentally until there's hardly anything left? You mother was tortured by him, you know that don't you? She told me. She forgave him. You know what else she told me? He turned from the dark. After everything, his last words were of light, not dark. They were for her."  
  
The water having evaporated, he's perspiring yet frozen. Her hands touch his clammy shoulders with calloused palms. There's a lifetime of hardship in that thickened skin at thumb and heel, he knows. It represents her loneliness. The years spend waiting were again acute in her, following his mother's loss.  
  
With Snoke gone, he took stock of their meeting, free from anyone else whispering in his head. _Lies. Lies_ , his old master would say. He searches for his own voice in how to respond. The only compulsions he recognises now regard her. Quiet for a moment, the frisson starts between them afresh and his body throbs with the beginnings of desire. A sensation he's never truly experienced, and then not in years. Ashamed he cannot temper himself, he tries to break free of her hold but she pins him with the a touch of The Force. He finds it difficult to breathe evenly, trapped so, locked in her power. His head however, finally catches up with his damaged body and he sways from blood loss. He falters now.  
  
She follows him, still touching, to the floor.  
  
He plants his hands back, and gazes up at her as she kneels over him. From the very first, she had bombarded his determination to shut out every bit of Light. Her pity switches to compassion and her fingers leave him to tear at his damp, blood soaked, pants. The wound was deeper than he'd previously thought and static starts to flicker at the edge of his vision.  
  
It’s a biological impulse, not weakness he tells himself, when the touch of her hand to his neck soothes him.  
  
"We need to treat this," she mutters.  
  
He gestures to the kit he'd laid out before showering. He was tired of machines patching him up. She collects it, frowns at the lack of pain relief, then begins to stitch. His thigh trembles but he doesn't move. The main wound closed, she cleans and eases tape over the gashes by his left hip, ribs, and eyebrow.  
  
By the time her ministrations are done, he's shivering from more than just fleshly trauma. She's trembling too, covered in old and new blood.  
  
“This doesn't end here, does it?” he says, commanding himself not to respond to her nearness.  
  
Her eyes are wide and searching when she meets his gaze again. Something in him or her snaps, and all resistance fails. Their lips pause before they meet; the touch, when it happens, is soft, brimming with instant connection, one similar but deeper, than the touch of their hands.  
  
Before he gives conscious rise to the action, his arms come around her body. She gasps and pulls back, her eyes flickering over his face before she darts back in, seizing his mouth, deepening the kiss.  
  
"This is wrong," she mutters, voice thick, tongue entwined with his.  
  
He explores her mouth, awash with sensations he'd strangled for so long. New sensations, those of a man, and not a boy. Her words are slow to sink in. "Yes," he pants, lungs heaving. He lets go of her and retreats as much as he can while sat on the floor with her crouched over him.  
  
A shade of a confusion passes over her face, but she keeps her gaze on him. With determination, it's he who looks away. The rotten chasm in his chest fights to snap shut on him, but tectonic, the vastness opens by millimetres the longer she's with him.  
  
She lowers herself to his averted face, her breath running gently over his facial scar, then she leans back with an air of finality.  
  
She cups his cheek as his father had. It hurts, tearing at him, for the touch says farewell. "Be responsible for your future, Ben," she says, before vanishing.

 


End file.
